Your/You’re? Hmm… if “due” is treated as a noun, then “your due” would be used just like “your mom” or “your bicycle.” If you include the first part “Do you wilt and whine, if you fail to win…” it simply doesn’t make much sense to our ears today, even if it’s truly archaic. I guess it could be roughly translated, “In the manner you think is owed to you,” but I’m a fan of “you’re.”

There is nothing wrong with ‘your’ in this case since ‘due’ is treated as a noun here. Try reading it as “in the manner you think [is] your due”.
The omission of some occurrences of words like ‘is’ and ‘that’ is relatively common. Come to think of it, you could also say the above statement should’ve been “in the manner [that] you think [is] your due”.

What about a girl teammate? I wasn’t ever allowed to play baseball/little league with my buddies who were all boys. I HATED it. That was 25 years ago. It should be different now. If it’s not, it /should/.

*a girl who was NOT into powder puff, flag football or underhand softball. & so had to sit out of sports altogether in a darker age.*

So what? Team sports are generally played into separate teams for boys and girls…You’re feminist complaint has no place here. The boy is a recurring character of zen comics. Gavin wasn’t going to put him on a team of girls just because of those reasons you said. He’s not being sexist…

At least in my area many kids teams are co-ed now up to a certain age, even football and hockey, much to the chagrin of many boys who have to deal with the fact that the girls have grown and matured faster and are sometimes bigger and almost always more coordinated. On many of the local soccer teams, to “kick like a girl” is an aspiration, not an insult.

I’m turning 40 this year, and when I was a kid, the local Little League WAS (and still IS) Co-Ed. And this was in a community that is generally considered backwards, as in 5-10 years in the past from the rest of the state! I grew up in a part of California where Rednecks & Country/Western music are still the norm, if that tells you anything.

Well, were that the case, then women could simply try out with the men, and fail if they were inferior, succeed if not.
There are other reasons why sports teams are gender segregated…
Locker-room reasons, I suppose.

Injury from trying to keep up with others who are, on average, much stronger than you is another reason. This is why female firefighters, no matter how capable during the tests, tend to retire early, according to my friend who is a (male) firefighter.

You know what else I HATE about ZP? All we ever see is the Shaolin Monk. That is discriminatory against other styles martial arts! How dare Gavin use his comic as a pulpit for his backward, jingoistic, martial bigotry?! Cant he see that it is his highest duty, as an artist who makes things I like for free, to represent EVERY martial art so that I feel slightly offended?

So, a student of social economics among others, I also have gender studies on my plate right now. I have to weigh in a little.
I gave much thought to this, starting out from a very feminist perspective.
I considered what I found looking at society.
Then I again looked at so many great authors (of both genders), some of them featured here.
It stands out to me, that boys and young men are in much greater need of guidance, care and encouragement than girls are.
History is full of misguided male figures, who had extreme potential, but noone to guide them, no righteous male mentor. Some of them turned crazy, some of them we know became dictators. Misguided potential. But I’m thinking more of the misguided regular guy, than the historical big-shot.

And yes, maybe in the past it would’ve been hard for a women to assume a position so powerful as to become a dictator. But again, I’m looking to regular everyday life. Men are fucked up, we are NOT what we ought to be. I cannot say the same for women, quite to that extent. It’s true for them too, just glancing over to b-models and porn, they also don’t have the role-models they would deserve.
But as I said, in everyday life, I know much more broken men (some of them don’t seem to be on the outside) or at least bad men, than I know women who are so far off from what they could be.
Women are somehow more enduring, they can thrive without encouragement or much guidance, it’s good if they do have that, but they also manage without. I’m thinking about all the women who raise their kids alone, while the men took off, they couldn’t take it, they were not strong or enduring or of good character.

This discussion has been here before on ZP with how many quotes from women and men are featured. It was good this discussion was there. But you cannot bind an artist to a 50/50 rate if maybe the are overall more male authors.

And what is more important. Young men need guidance. They need a goal, to see their lifes are going somewhere. They need to feel needed and appreciated by society.
Now women do too, but they don’t go crazy and join gangs (I know very little female gangs) if they don’t get that, they can keep it together far better.
Young men should have mentors, good authors help too, but a real person would be better. (Ideally we should have fathers, but our society has looked at “ideally” in the rear-view mirror at some point between the industrialisation and WWII).

If anyone is interested, I can recommend Donald Miller’s “To own a dragon”. The first few chapters capture this nicely.

Oh, forgot the point while writing.
It’s good to sometimes have a male-role model beyond either softies and machos. A guy who doesn’t succumb to the pressure of society.
Who leaves behind the “comfort” that men usually strives for and gives his ill-gained reputation or wealth or status away, so he may build character.
I think, for the reasons above, that boys are in greater need of this kind of role-model than girls. Boys spoil easier.

Charles, you think you’re not sexist because you think men are “fucked-up” and women are “more enduring”, but that’s really just another way of classifying women as some mystical “other”. This is the same kind of logic that leads to victim blaming. Since men aren’t expected to be able to control themselves, the responsibility falls on women to make sure they aren’t tempted.

The truth is that we are all people and people fall on a spectrum on most character traits. Men tend to fall on the more athletic side of the spectrum and women tend to fall on the more nurturing side, but the ranges overlap. Some girls are much more athletic than some boys, for example, so why should they be excluded from certain athletic opportunities just because “most girls” lack the interest and aptitude?

Strong role models and community building activities benefit everyone. Even if you’re right that more boys need strong role models than girls, who cares? Why do you feel the need to make it an exclusive boys’ club for them to have the benefit?

Beautiful, as most of your work is, Gavin. Thank you for what you do.
I humbly suggest that this would be even stronger if it ended in the next-to-last panel, with “then you will be playing the game” next to the close up of the kid’s eyes. The fact that he connects with the ball is not as important as the fact that he got up after failing, and had the right attitude (“I shall do or die”) to give it his all. We, as parents and coaches, are taught to praise effort, and not result. The kid won the moment he picked up the bat and decided to go for it again, not when he connected with the ball (skill, luck).

It may have been inspired, however, by the 20th Century writer Grantland Rice, who wrote a sports-related poem about “How to play the game”. The poem is called “Alumnus Football”. It was published in November, 1914:

Grantland’s Rice could have inspired this “anonymous” writer, but the concept of “How to play the game” goes farther than that in my opinion. The Greek writer Herodotus (in Book VIII. 26, sometime in the 5th Century BC) wrote “tis not for money they contend but for glory of achievement” (about the Olympians).

(To Combat Scholar: I disagree. Neither playing a sports game or real life should be played to win. Life’s to short to be so competitive. Life’s to short not to take it with a bucket of salt; not to enjoy it for the sake of enjoying it. My 2 cents of course. We all choose to live differently.

One could also argue though, that “to win” has a different meaning to you, than to me. So, in a way, I suppose I also completely agree with you. It is important to play both games and life “to win”- what we choose to try and win is more-so the questionable element here.)

Ugh. I’m not a Cormac McCarthy. His stories are interesting, but his delivery (purposeful lack of punctuation) drives me nuts. (In case you’re wondering, I’m an English professor and a yet-to-be-published author.)

Excellent comic though. The rhyming was hard to keep straight at times, but I think it’s just the structure of the poem.

hey Gav, i found this wonderful quote by Bob Marley a while ago. It’d be interesting to see what you could do with it.

“You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She’s not perfect – you aren’t either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break – her heart. So don’t hurt her, don’t change her, don’t analyze and don’t expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she’s not there.”-Bob Marley

Gav. Thanks for this. Not commented before but had to here.
Wanted you to know the the kid reminds me of my own boy and I’ll be showing him this one later after he had a tough day with his football team yesterday. I know it’ll make him smile.

It’s strange, I’ve been following you for quite some time now and never have I ever had one favourite comic… until I read this one about two weeks ago.
In that two-week period I must have come back to it at least five times.
This fifth time I realized something. I now have a favourite comic.
Thank you, Gav, thank you.

Earliest reference I could find on Google books was from The Shoe Makers Journal in 1921, it appears in several similar US publications in the 20s to 40s, always with the author unknown. So not Rudyard Kipling then… the style reminds me of Edgar Albert Guest, but his is not a difficult style to imitate so I guess it could have been anyone

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So…you know how in the movies there’s these scenes where a character has some breakthrough revelation and it’s such a shock that they gasp and sway and drop whatever they’re holding? Yeah, you just did that to me when I got to this strip. I’m not sure what exactly I just realized, but finding out should be interesting.